Nick, Rhonda, Reese, Finn, Charlie, Rio and Sally Jenkins

Now Isn’t This Rich?

Gov. Gregoire's complaints about representation were quite ironic to this extradition victim.

Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna’s announcement that he would join other state AG’s in challenging the constitutionality of the new federal health care legislation (read) — and Governor Christone Gregoire’s reaction to it — brought me a nice chuckle. According to The Seattle Times, Governor Gregoire was none too pleased about the AG’s decision:

“I don’t know who he represents. He doesn’t represent me,” Gregoire said. “I don’t think he represents a million and a half Washingtonians that will be helped by this. I don’t think he represents small business that will be helped by this. I don’t think he represents Medicare people who will be helped by this.”

The Times article added that

Gregoire said she told him to “get ready to represent me” because she intends to file a legal brief opposing McKenna’s action.

Ah, “represent(ation).” All quite rich. Why? Well, my two readers might know that a subordinate of General McKenna, an assistant Attorney General named Jerry Ackerman, is the de facto general counsel for the Washington State Gambling Commission. In that capacity, he was involved in advising Commission enforcers how to bet on Betcha.com so that charges in Louisiana would stick — at the very same time he was litigating the case against Betcha. My hunch is that, as a former subordinate of Gregoire’s when the latter was Washington’s AG, he was also involved in the Commission’s efforts to convince Gregoire to extradite me to Louisiana in the fall of 2007. She did, of course, even though we had a court date on the merits scheduled for just three weeks later, the result of which would have brought the whole extradition into question. She did all this, mind you, after her office refused to meet with Betcha’s counsel to discuss the matter, and after it had received literally dozens of e-mails from Washingtonians urging her to hold off at least until we’d had our day in court. With her signature I and two of my colleagues became the first people in the history of the world extradited to Louisiana for allegedly violating its online gambling law.

So I wonder, as Governor Gregoire complains about General McKenna’s “representation”: back in ’07, how come she didn’t care about who was representing me? Indeed, she cared so little about it that her office wouldn’t even take a meeting with us. The Commission, by contrast, got a meeting to make their case — and it worked. The result was that Governor Gregoire extradited three Washingtonians to Louisiana over four bets made between law enforcement officials in Washington and Louisiana in which Betcha grossed exactly seventy cents.

(For the record: “betcha” big money that the AG lawsuit will almost certainly be unsuccessful. There is no federal judge in the country with ambitions of promotion who would dare strike the health care purchase requirement down. The states’ only hope is that the case gets assigned to an oldish conservative Republican district court judge who has no allusions of promotion. Because if (s)he strikes this thing down, his/her career is all but over. If it makes it to the Supreme Court — as many predict it will — the Court will uphold it 5-4. Justice Anthony Kennedy will be the swing vote, and I don’t see him taking a position that would make him persona non grata at Beltway cocktail parties.)

UPDATE: The Seattle P-I is already writing General McKenna’s political obit:

I agree that this won’t help McKenna in Washington and, given the number of other AG’s pursuing this tact, I can’t understand what McKenna thought he had to gain by this move. Regardless, I’ll “betcha” big money that it’s Gregoire v. McKenna in 2012.